SKorea: Indictments in international school admissions

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Original article in Korean is at this link. No mention of anyone at the schools being charged, but it’s hard to believe they were unaware.

47 parents are being charged, including one being detained in jail, on charges related to international school admissions.

In a briefing on the 6th the Incheon District Public Prosecutor’s Office announced the indictments of 46 people and the arrest of 36-year old Mrs. Gwon on charges of forgery for sending their children to foreigner’s schools by producing fake admission documents.

Most of them are from the upper class, with four chaebol relatives, four are representatives or execcutives at financial firms, 21 are business executives, and seven are doctors.

Mrs. Gwon allegedly hired a broker in 2009 to create false passports for Bulgaria and the United Kingdom, then used them to gain her daughter admission to a foreigner’s school in Seoul.

Mrs. Gwon, the daghter-in-law of well-known businessman in the Chungcheong region, also allegedly had a fake Guatamalan passport produced to get her daughter into another foreigner’s school in Seoul. Mrs. Gwon paid 100 million won for the passports, investigators found.

Another parent who was indicted allegedly paid a broker 50 million to 100 million won to forge necessary admissions documents to gain her children admission to a foreigner’s school.

Many of the parents stayed in Guatamala and other Central American nations for two or three days, where they used brokers to forge citizenship papers. They gained their children’s school admissions by reporting tthat they had obtained passports from those countries through local passport authorities and changed their citizenship.

Some of the parents received from their brokers passports of African nations which they never even visited and which don’t have official residences in Korea, then sent copies of the passports to the schools without reporting a change of citizenship, thus gaining their children admission.

Foreigner’s schools require that one of a student’s parents be a foreigner. If both parents are non-foreigners then they have a 30% chance of admission after staying abroad for three years.

Prosecutors uncovered 56 cases of fraudulent admission at nine such schools through this investigation. Prosecutors plan to send the list of names of fraudulent admittees to the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, and to provincial and local offices of education.

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